Abstract: During the U.S. Occupation, Teruya was designated the Black District of Okinawa because of U.S. racial prejudice. The prevailing literary and scholarly representations of the Black District portray it as a place of ecological, social, and moral ruination—yet ruin is not all there is to see. In this essay, I propose a "yuntaku reading method" as an Indigenous feminist methodology to read against and beyond ruination, putting literary analysis in dialogue with the Okinawan cultural and social form of yuntaku (Uchinaaguchi: chit-chat, gossip, conversation). Drawing on a close reading of Jun Kishaba's short story "Dark Flowers" (1955) and yuntaku with Teruya residents, I argue that even as tropes of ruination allowed Okinawans to critique the transpacific coloniality and racial logics underpinning the U.S.-Japanese settler militarist structure, they demonstrated a refusal to allow ruination to be the sole condition of their social and psychic lives. By reading against ruination, a yuntaku reading method reveals the complexities of living with/in occupation. Ultimately, by conceptualizing the literary and the everyday, I suggest that Okinawans, through their everyday actions, transformed Black-Okinawan relationalities into fertile ground for articulating other possible futures, enacting everyday sovereignties between ruin and rebellion in Okinawa's Black District.
Nozomi Nakaganeku Saito (2026) studied this question.